As a worker in Elon's campus bookstore for two and a half years, senior Molly Steinberg said she's seen a student pay as much as $1,000 for textbooks in a single semester.
The amounts that students pay for textbooks each year may drastically decrease over the next few years due to a new textbook company that is out to sell a new type of textbook: free ones.
"With the cost of college skyrocketing and with aid not keeping pace, we want to see as many students as possible have free textbooks," said Tom Doran, CEO and founder of Freeload Press. "(Textbooks) are too important to go without . . . we're seeing textbook purchases declining as tuition increases."
Freeload Press, which was created in St. Paul, Minn., gave its downloadable college textbooks a test run this past fall.
Fifty-one instructors from 20 colleges used the company's e-books, and because of the positive feedback from both students and professors, 175 colleges and universities are registered to use them for the spring 2006 semester.
Elon University finance professor, Wonhi Synn, will be the first professor in North Carolina to provide free textbooks to his students next semester.
"The reason I'm trying this out for my section is because the textbook I'm using is good quality," he said. "I would not adopt something that is sub-quality just because it's free."
Students in Synn's Fundamentals of Financial Managing class will download their e-books using Adobe Acrobat format from Freeload Press' Internet Portal...If they would rather have a hardcopy, the company also offers paperback e-books with advertising, which are sold for 60 percent less than the original cost of the textbook.
"We debated about using a browser base, but students want a sense of ownership," Doran said. "They want the information right on the laptop or desktop so they can have at it any time they want without worrying about being connected."...Freeload Press is currently using 10 corporate sponsors. When businesses sponsor Freeload Press, they are able to put advertisements in the front of the printed book and in chapter openings of e-textbooks....So what's the possibility of every student getting all of their textbooks for free in the next couple years? Doran said it may be a longer project than we may hope. But he also said that these first steps made by Freeload Press are meant to cause a reaction and make an example for other companies to follow.
"That's our goal," Doran said. "We're trying to show other publishers that we work, we can get sponsors and we can get academics to use the commercial textbook."...
Freeload Press is the first media and publishing company to adopt the idea of using commercial sponsoring to reduce the price of textbooks.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/27/2006 10:51:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
